From the category archives:

Numbers

How Does Society Value Additional Time for Your Dying Loved One?

There is an excellent article in this week’s BusinessWeek written by the widow of a man who fought a long and courageous battle with cancer.  What differentiated this article from other similar accounts is that the article stepped through a very detailed financial account of just how costly it is to sustain a terminal patient [...]

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Bragging Rights – Have You Considered the Context?

I often hear people bragging about personal or company accomplishments with data.  Data is truth, right?  Well, it depends on how it’s presented – what the context is.  Here are some examples:

The CEO – I heard a CEO bragging on CNBC about a 60% return from the March lows so the company must be doing [...]

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What Are The Odds?

This guest post comes from Michael, a contributing editor of the Dough Roller,a personal finance and investing blog, and Credit Card Offers IQ, a credit card review site.

I’m the type of guy that is always looking up to the sky after having something bad happen and wonder, “What are [...]

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Study: Smart Investors MUCH Better Stock Pickers than Dumb Investors

I came across a neat research paper from UCLA and a few others universities seeking to address the topic of whether investors with a high IQ actually exhibit superior investment performance over others.  This study strikes at the heart of the notion that stock picking is a random walk and no one investor can reasonably [...]

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The Gold-Dollar Correlation Explained and Why it Broke Down

Last week, I had posted on how the euphoric gold hype was really just a proxy for a weak dollar investment and there are more highly correlated and efficient means to exploit currency changes than buying an anachronistic, useless metal.  Additionally, there’s talk of a dollar crisis and what it portends for commodity prices.  When [...]

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Oil Gas Price Correlation: How to Estimate the Impact of Oil Prices on Your Wallet

Have you ever wondered what would happen to gas prices if oil prices skyrocketed to $200 as Goldman Sachs had predicated last year, or if oil prices plummeted to $20?  It’s not easy to discern the oil-gas price correlation since there are other factors at play ranging from refining and distribution to taxes.  Therefore, the [...]

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Are you Efficient? Save Time by Applying Lean Thinking to Everyday Life

I came across this article today on how Starbucks is implementing industrial engineering principles in their workplace.  While they’re calling it something catchy like LEAN Sigma and utilizing some other Toyota nomenclature (a founding father of modern Quality/Efficiency methods), it’s all based on the same principals – efficient work, parallel path vs. critical path activities, [...]

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Median vs. Mean: Know the Difference or Risk Being Manipulated

The definition of median and mean and the difference between the two terms is poorly understood by many people and while in many data sets, there is only a marginal difference between the two from a practical standpoint, there is sometimes a stark difference between the two.  As I’ll outline in this article, people toss [...]

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